Jason and Leslie Phillips: "Love shouldn't have to be this hard"
Throughout these pages I will illustrate my ideas with in-depth stories about long-term relationships. Some of the couples that I describe are taken directly from my practice, though carefully disguised. Some of these couples have read what I’ve written, making corrections when they felt that I portrayed them inaccurately. Others are more loosely cobbled together, based on composites from years of practice.

As you read these stories, please keep in mind: this is not a book about therapy, rather it is a book about the creative, reparative, and transformative potential of lasting intimacy. Therapy can certainly be a useful catalyst, but when it comes to growth and change, a long-term, trusting relationship is at least therapy’s equal. (Current research suggests that it is the relationship that is the most important factor in therapeutic outcome.) In these pages therapy is meant only to be a privileged lens, one that allows unique access into the intimate lives of some remarkable people. If  you hold on to this perspective you will be halfway to the central take-home message of  this book: we have the power to change ourselves, often in surprising and important ways. And we change best when we allow ourselves to be changed by someone to whom we are very close.

Finally, because this is a book about what relationships at their best can be, the stories that I have told portray some of the most creative and resourceful couples that I have known over twenty-five years of practice. Please don’t be daunted. If we are willing to do the hard work of building loving and trusting relationships, and if we are then willing to risk leaning back into that love and trust in order to be open and real with each other, we can all  be changed, even in those places that we feel to be most injured, and, it follows, most immovable.

Now let’s introduce the first of the many couples that populate this book. Jason and Leslie Phillips show us something about the problems of growing older, and of growing older together. And they also show us how those very problems can be turned into remarkable opportunities for overcoming, indeed for growing through, the central challenges of middle age.

At first glance, Jason and Leslie seemed a good fit. Both were a bit on the short side, slightly overweight, and, it seemed, possessing of a certain shared softness — in both features and demeanor. Their clothes were high-quality without being obviously fashionable, and I noticed that they had arrived at my home office in a Mercedes.

When I asked how I might help, Jason and Leslie shared a wary glance. He took the lead. “We’ve been married twenty-three years,” he noted, his tone pointedly factual. “We were really in love with each other early on, at least I think we were, it seems so long ago. Then the kids came along, and — well, you know what happens. They’re almost grown up now — our daughter is already off at college and our son is going to start next year. There weren’t any big fights or anything, it just seems like we drifted apart ...”

“No big fights?” Leslie glared at Jason, her voice brimming with anger and hurt. “Aren’t we having a pretty big fight now?”

“I was just about to get to that,” Jason answered, his factual tone persisting in the face of Leslie’s fury. “She’s referring to the fact that I’ve been involved with another woman.”

The story was a painfully familiar one. Over the past several months Leslie had become suspicious about the unexplained brightening of Jason’s mood, the increased care he took with his appearance, and the way their already minimal sex life had become nonexistent. She turned detective, amassing the evidence from numbers on Jason’s cell phone, from romantic cards found on his desk that never came her way, and from unusual charges on his credit card. Her husband, once confronted, confessed. He had become involved with a younger assistant at the advertising office he ran.

My job, during our first few sessions, was to try to limit the damage, and, once things had settled down, to help the couple see what could be salvaged. For starters, this meant pointing out that Jason and Leslie were going about things in all the wrong ways. He was willing to break off the affair, but not the relationship.

“She understands me in a way that Leslie never could,” Jason said, though I thought I could see him wince at how clichéd his words sounded.

Leslie threw herself back into the sexual relationship with Jason, hoping that by giving him excitement reminiscent of their early days together she could save their marriage.

While Jason paid lip service to his responsibility for having had an affair, he blamed Leslie for the marriage’s coldness and estrangement, and he didn’t understand that he had been equally responsible for letting things become stale.

Leslie, similarly, couldn’t see her contribution to their marital troubles. She could be bitingly critical, and over the past several years it had become her habit to retreat into four or five glasses of wine every night.

Both Jason and Leslie had conspired to preside over years of growing estrangement, disappointment, and bitterness. Each partner blamed the other, and neither talked about his or her own responsibility for things.

It took a few sessions to establish some ground rules. First off, did they want to try to repair things? Leslie immediately indicated yes, and when Jason, after a moment’s pause, added, “That’s why we’re here,” his conviction surprised me. Well, I noted, there were things each would have to do.

Jason would need to break things off entirely with the woman he had been seeing; as long as he could turn to her whenever things got hard with Leslie, he would be less inclined to commit himself to the kind of work that would be needed.

Leslie would have to stop drinking; alcohol enabled her to retreat from the feelings that she needed to talk about with Jason.

Jason needed to take a hard look at his notion that the problem had to do with the lack of excitement and romance: this belief would lead them away from building the foundation they needed to repair things.

And Leslie needed to stop trying to appease Jason by providing that excitement.

“I suspect that, at least right now, you can trust hard, painful talks more than great sex,” I told them. “And you’ve got to work on how you have those talks. You’ve got to find a way to replace all this blame and defensiveness with a willingness to be open about how you feel, about what you want, about who you really are.”

Jason was skeptical about my plan. “All that sounds like such hard work,” he said. “It’s not that I can’t work hard, I’ve done it all my life. But I’m tired. Marriage, raising kids, my job. Where’s the fun? I don’t expect it to be like when we first met, but I need there to be a little more life and understanding.”

“Understanding?” Leslie interrupted, her voice dripping with contempt. “Is that why you look at the pictures of celebrities in bikinis while we’re waiting in line at the supermarket, why your eyes follow every young thing that walks by you? To feel more understood?”

I considered stepping in here. Leslie had a right to be furious, but we were still trying to establish a framework within which the couple could talk without things spiraling into blame and recrimination. To my surprise, however, Jason softened things with some subdued but heartfelt words.

“I am having trouble with being just one more middle-aged guy who no woman would ever look twice at,” he said. “I can’t stand the idea that my life is nothing special, OK? But what exactly is the point of all this hard work? It just seems — I don’t know — love shouldn’t have to be this hard.”

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